Locations and dates finalized for 2026 World Cup
United States, Mexico and Canada will host the FIFA World Cup two years from now. What can global footy fans expect as they travel to watch matches in North America?
In partnership with FOX Sports, FIFA announced the locations and dates of the matches to be played in the 2026 FIFA World Cup Sunday.
On the broadcast, which featured celebrities such as Kevin Hart, Drake and Kim Kardashian, as well as TV personalities more familiar to global football fans, FIFA’s president Gianni Infantino announced the sites and dates of each round of the 2026 competition.
The opening match will be held at the famed, high-elevation Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, Mexico while the World Cup Final will be held at Metlife Stadium in New Jersey, home to the NFL’s New York Giants and New York Jets. Atlanta and Dallas will host the semifinal matches along with a host of others leading up to the final in the New York metro area.
Joe Pompliano has a good recap of what was announced on Twitter, as does The Athletic (paywalled).
What will be interesting is to see what it means for foreign fans traveling to some of these locations thinking they’ll be going to cities like San Francisco or Boston only to realize the stadiums are far from their respective city centers. While that shouldn’t be a problem for many, others may be surprised to find the public transportation isn’t what it is here like in other soccer hotbeds such as Europe.
Levi’s Stadium in the Bay Area will host six early round matches, but fans will find it difficult to visit the city of San Francisco and attend the match in the same day. The stadium is a whopping 36 miles away from what I consider the middle of The City1. Fans will be traversing three separate counties to make it to the game if they’re coming from downtown San Francisco, making it the farthest stadium from that city’s central district of any of the participating venues. This, of course, is nothing new for 49ers fans.
Public transportation is an option, but California is notorious for being a car-first state so I’m curious to see what local officials do to service the influx of soccer fans from around the globe.
Gillette Stadium is similarly in the metro area’s suburbs rather than being near downtown Boston — it’s 21 miles away from the central part of the city. Dallas’ AT&T Stadium is in the suburb of Arlington, Texas about 17 miles away from that city center as well.
On the other end of the spectrum is Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium and Seattle’s Lumen Field, two places that have emerged as legitimate soccer crazy parks because of their fervent MLS fanbases (Seattle Sounders and Atlanta United) aided by the bars and nightlife that support pre- and post-match festivities in those cities. Both those locations are in the respective downtown area.
What makes the location of the World Cup Final at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey unique is that it’s not even in the same state as what many visiting fans will view as the main area attraction — New York City. Head to Twitter if you want to see some of the all too real jokes the internet has been making about the decision already.
The last World Cup in Qatar featured stadiums so close to each other players and fans didn’t have to get on flights to attend multiple matches given that country’s small geographic footprint. Now the 2026 World Cup will feature three separate countries that are among the largest landmasses in the world and with footprints at least 170 times the size of Qatar.
Explore the visualization below to see the relative locations and stats for each of the stadiums hosting the 2026 World Cup:
Another interesting note is none of the stadiums used in the 1994 FIFA World Cup hosted by the U.S. will be used in this tournament, while Estadio Azteca is the only stadium in the 2026 tournament that has previously hosted any World Cup matches.
Distances computed using the Haversine formula, also known as “as the crow flies.” Haversine is a calculation based on spherical trigonometry, assuming the Earth is a perfect sphere, which provides a good approximation of the distance between two relatively close points. If you utilize the longitude and latitude for your points and known circumference of the earth you get a good approximation of the straight line distance of two points.